Japan's highly theatrical and most successful contemporary dance company, Sankai Juku, winner of the 2002 Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production, returns to Sadler's Wells from 10 - 14 June with the UK première of the Company's latest work Kagemi.

Sankai Juku is led by the visionary dancer, designer and choreographer Ushio Amagatsu. His distinctive style sets powdered white dancers against large-scale sets and spectacular lighting. Amagatsu combines the power and intensity of highly controlled movement with shifting natural forms such as sand and water, to create unforgettable pictures from every pose and gesture.

Kagemi, or, Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, is a work in seven tableaux for seven male dancers. Kagemi is thought to be the origin of the word mirror and the performance explores the other world reflected by the mirror image. Alternating between shade and light the dancers seem to float through a forest of giant suspended lotus flowers.

Sankai Juku was formed in 1975 by Ushio Amagatsu. He took Butoh dance and fused it with western physical theatre and high-impact visual effects. Ankoko Butoh, meaning Dance of Darkness, was created in the 1960s by the Japanese avant-garde as a response to the atmosphere of pain and suffering pervasive in Japan in the post war, post Hiroshima era. It was a new theatrical language, drawing on the great traditions of Noh and Kabuki theatre, and combining them with influences from Western contemporary dance and literature.

Now aged 53 Amagatsu still performs with Sankai Juku and is the central force behind the company.

The Maskby JOY GOODWIN for the Village Voicepublished: October 30, 2006

Ushio Amagatsu, the 57-year-old designer, choreographer, and soloist of the Sankai Juku troupe, turns butoh into spellbinding ritual. Kagemi (2000), having its New York premiere at BAM, is not your typical butoh experience. Its slowness is focused in images crisp as an Avedon photo...

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, these are the fairest of them allSankai Juku
“Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors”
Presented by San Francisco Performances and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
November 14, 2006

Butoh is more than dance; it incorporates theater and a feeling of meditation, which transforms one from being a passive audience member to a spiritually active one. Seeing Sankai Juku’s “Kagemi: Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors” on Tuesday night, I truly felt transformed in both body and spirit. Entering Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Forum, my date and I were awestruck by the softly lit, life-size white lilies floating effortlessly onstage above a creamy white platform. In fact, I grew quite giddy trying to count them before the show, finally settling on a number roughly in the range of many several dozen or more-than-50-less-than-80. At the same time, faint music trickled in through the speakers and the glow from the flowers’ outlines created a calming pattern of dark circles on stage, transporting me to a cream-colored Japanese-influence version of Disney’s “Fantasia.” All this, and the official performance hadn’t even started yet!

Sankai Juku’s well-deserved return to the Bay Area (it’s been 5 years) was nothing short of magical. The seven clay-covered dancers included Ushio Amagatsu (the company’s founder and artistic director), Semimaru, Sho Takeuchi, Akihito Ichihara, Taiyo Tochiaki, Ichiro Hasegawa, and Dai Matsuoka. Beginning with a single dancer, the work ebbed and flowed like a school of fish on a journey, venturing toward a very self-satisfying yet personally enriching and transitional climax. What struck me most was the care and dedication each performer committed to and how they moved with the music and each other: lifting an arm, tilting their heads, finding a driving rhythm, walking purposefully backwards and forwards. The intricacies that we don’t normally see or pay attention to came alive in this performance, and were enhanced even more by the canopy of lilies (which were lifted high up yet not out of sigh early on in the performance), Satoru Suzuki’s warm golden lighting, Masayo Iizuka’s variations-of-white “costume realization,” and an original and varied score by Takashi Kako and Yoichiro Yoshikawa.

The company received a well-deserved standing ovation from the sold-out crowd, and San Francisco Performances and Yerba Buena should be commended for bringing such a high quality company back to San Francisco. Hopefully Sankai Juku can return for a longer run next time, providing more people the opportunity to share in their wonderfully rich and introspective style.

It's not hard to see why Sankai Juku is the leading popularizer of Japanese butoh, so wildly loved that co-presenters San Francisco Performances and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts counted themselves lucky to book a sold-out, two-night midweek run at the YBCA Theater.

Sankai Juku returns to Seattle for one performance of "Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors" on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 at the Paramount Theatre. R. M. Campbell recapitulates a bit of Sankai Juku's history in Seattle and previews the performance in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

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